Javascript: generators for async

I stumbled across this article by James Long (@jlongster) on using generators for async as an alternative to async/await. His Q.async example, using Kris Kowal’s (@kriskowal) Q library, caught my eye and I decided to try implementing the async function without peeking at Q’s code. It took me a little while to come up with this solution, but the result is pleasingly simple!

async accepts a generator and returns a function that returns a promise. The yielded expressions in the generator are the fulfilled values. This allows running asynchronous code in synchronous style, without using async/await. Here’s a simple example of how it’s used:

Notice that you can yield promises or plain values, it doesn’t matter. Also, this supports using try/catch with asynchronous calls. Pretty cool!

For comparison, here is the Q.async implementation. After writing this up I also found the solution here (essentially same as Q.async). It differs from mine in that I’m not using an explicit try/catch to turn the synchronous error into an asynchronous one, but it happens implicitly due to being wrapped in a Promise, so I think the result/behavior is the same.